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Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

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Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 05:00:54

No Cause for Shame -- By: Marc A. Thiessen

Posted on August 28, 2009
The release this week of the CIA inspector general?s report makes clear that the CIA interrogation program was both lawful and effective in stopping new attacks. But was it moral? I believe that Americans can be comfortable not only with the efficacy but also with the morality of this effort...

A Test of Kennedy Currency -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on August 28, 2009
If you read the newspapers or watch the news, you will encounter a long list of accomplishments by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. One thing you?re less likely to hear, however, is that in his death, Kennedy proved Rush Limbaugh right.In March, the talk-show host and bęte noir of progressives everywhere said that the health-care bill wending its way through Congress would eventually be dubbed the ?Ted Kennedy Memorial Health-Care Bill...

Obamacare: The Only Exit Strategy -- By: Charles Krauthammer

Posted on August 28, 2009
Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead. The 1,000-page monstrosity that emerged in various editions from Congress was done in by widespread national revulsion not just at its expense and intrusiveness but at the mendacity with which it is being sold. You don?t need a Ph...

Kennedy by Proxy -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on August 28, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.The Kennedys have always tended their family?s legacy tenderly and brilliantly...

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Time for Health-Care Tax Cuts! -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on August 28, 2009
Temecula, Calif. -- The raging national debate over Obamacare revolves largely around spending. Should Washington plunge itself $1.1 trillion deeper into medicine? While this conversation dominates the headlines, Americans also should consider how tax cuts could improve the delivery and payment of health care...

Remembering the Darker Side of Teddy Kennedy -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on August 28, 2009
The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we are being told, should strengthen our resolve to act in a bipartisan fashion. Many of the tributes from former presidents and Republican colleagues have stressed the late senator?s willingness to find ?common ground...

Our Father & My Father -- By: Rev. John J. McCartney

Posted on August 28, 2009
?The greatest husband and father in the history of the world did not shower his family with material things. St. Joseph gave them something of much greater value: He gave them himself. Every moment of every day, through his love, his sacrifice, his labor, he gave them himself...

Ted Kennedy's Road to Serfdom -- By: Flashback

Posted on August 28, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This piece by Susan Mandel appeared in the May 28, 1990, issue of National Review. (You can dig into NR?s archives anytime here.)When Senator Edward Kennedy went to Georgetown University in April to deliver a major address on the state of the Democratic party, the auditorium was barely half full...

The Senator and the Symbol -- By: An NRO Symposium

Posted on August 28, 2009
We?ve been told that he was the ?Lion of the Senate? and the conscience of American liberalism. And now we?re told that we should surrender on nationalizing health care, which Democrats propose to do in tribute to him. But what is Sen. Edward M. Kennedy?s actual political legacy? Several longtime Kennedy-watchers weigh in...

The Latest Profile in Courage -- By: Flashback

Posted on August 28, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This piece by William F. Buckley Jr. appeared in the May 22, 2001, issue of National Review. (You can dig into NR?s archives anytime here.)The event at the Kennedy Library in Boston was pretty heady historical stuff. There at the Windsor Castle of Camelot were the two most illustrious survivors, brother Edward Kennedy and daughter Caroline Kennedy...

Steady Teddy -- By: Flashback

Posted on August 28, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This piece by Dave Brudnoy appeared in the November 7, 1994, issue of National Review. (You can dig into NR?s archives anytime here.)Every six years, as he steps forward to let the masses know of his availability for continued occupancy of the governmental seat to which he is entitled by divine right, Edward Moore Kennedy, the Senior Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, hears a familiar refrain: this year things will be different; this year there will be an opponent of more than token significance; this year those irritating Republicans have managed to find somebody who?ll give him a run for his money...

What I Saw at the Retribution -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on August 27, 2009
Reston, Va. -- In the hour before Democratic congressman Jim Moran?s lone town hall of the August recess, the line stretched from the door of South Lakes High School, down the street, around a corner to a parking lot, into the parking lot, and then took three more turns...

Kennedy, Unsentimentally -- By: The Editors

Posted on August 27, 2009
He may have sometimes seemed like a gin-soaked anachronism from The Beautiful and the Damned who somehow wandered into 21st-century America, but Edward M. Kennedy is a permanent rebuke to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his assertion that there are no second acts in American lives...

Understanding Donald Rumsfeld -- By: Jamie M. Fly

Posted on August 27, 2009
Despite continued disagreements on the left and the right about the legacy of George W. Bush, there is one Bush-administration official who still unites political observers: Donald Rumsfeld. On the left, Democratic members of Congress and activists vilified Rumsfeld for his handling of the war in Iraq, Guantanamo, and the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; on the right, commentators called for Rumsfeld?s resignation less than seven months into his tenure because of his perceived inability to manage the Pentagon...

Crisis Management -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on August 27, 2009
During the 1990s, most of us thought we were living in a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. We even spent the ?peace dividend? -- cutting resources for intelligence and the military. The Cold War was over. We had no enemies worth worrying about...

War - What War? -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on August 27, 2009
The anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan headed this week to Martha?s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing. Once again she is protesting our two wars abroad. But Sheehan is a media has-been. ABC?s Charlie Gibson used to cover her anti-Bush rallies in Crawford, Tex...

When reality intrudes, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on August 27, 2009
In recent days, I?ve been expressing dismay at Hillary Clinton: in this column, for instance, and in this Corner post. Can you stand some more quotation of her? In an interview, she said, ?There are some days when we?re dealing with very difficult security issues when you kind of wish, ?Oh man, I wish I didn?t know that...

Remember 'No Controlling Legal Authority'? -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on August 26, 2009
It was a dozen years ago when Eric Holder began his first tour of duty at the Justice Department, as deputy attorney general. At the time, DOJ had a major hot potato on its hands: Al Gore, the vice president of the United States, had engaged in a clear, black-and-white felony violation of campaign-finance laws...

The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents -- By: Steven F. Hayward

Posted on August 26, 2009
Some years ago I had occasion to hear Sir Martin Gilbert, then in the midst of producing the official biography of Winston Churchill, discuss how he became interested in writing history. His answer was simple -- curiosity. As a small boy, he wondered why bombs were falling from the sky on London, why he was being packed aboard a ship and sent off to relatives in Canada, why his uncle in the army came back from captivity in Asia some years later weighing less than 100 pounds...

The Soviet Standard Returns -- By: Elliott Abrams

Posted on August 26, 2009
At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human-rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. When American officials denounced the lack of freedom of speech or press or religion, or the absence of free elections, they did not whimper...

Obama and 'Redistributive Change' -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on August 26, 2009
The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt?Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence?Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious?But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of Obamist policy-making...

Once Upon a Time in North Africa -- By: David Kahane

Posted on August 26, 2009
I don?t know about you, but I spent the weekend beaming with pride at the fierce moral example set by a compassionate Scottish government when it freed the long-suffering Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan ?terrorist? convicted for the 1988 Lockerbie man-caused disaster...

Portrait of the Artist in Afghanistan -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on August 26, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: Roman Genn, whose illustrations have long brightened the pages of National Review, embedded himself with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, at Forward Operating Base Gulistan in Farah Province, central Afghanistan. Genn reports that the Marines ?exhibited gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty by tolerating your humble doodler?s permanent bitching and whining...

The Slippery Slope of Health-Care Reform -- By: Michael G. Franc

Posted on August 26, 2009
Each day brings another twist to the health-care-reform saga. Should the president heed the braying of his hard-left allies, manipulate Senate procedural rules, and push through a massive overhaul of our entire health-care system? Or should he scale back the ambition of the proposals already approved by four congressional committees and settle for a ?modest? set of reforms to protect consumers from the predations of those sinister health-insurance companies? And, of course, there?s that nettlesome ?public plan? option: Should it stay, or should it go?On some days the prognosticators see less health reform in our future...

Bernanke's Balance Sheet -- By: The Editors

Posted on August 26, 2009
The Obama administration has two approaches to former Bush administration officials: Threaten them with prosecution (CIA interrogators, Justice Department lawyers) or reappoint them to office (the secretary of defense). Ben Bernanke, once known as ?Helicopter Ben? but destined to go down in history as ?Bailout Ben,? has been reappointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, though there are critics, left and right, who might have dreamed in secret of the other approach...

Obama and Faith -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on August 26, 2009
The fight over health care took the most interesting turn last week. President Obama briefly switched from wonkish frippery about bending cost curves to speaking of faith. Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side...

Who can believe them? &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on August 26, 2009
I wonder what people, generations from now, will think about our current obsession with -- not to say hysteria over -- global warming. Paul Johnson, for one, thinks that people will think we underwent a bout of mass madness. I imagine they will. Senator Stabenow, from my home state of Michigan, has said, ?Climate change is very real...

The Lesson of the Kennedys -- By: Michael Knox Beran

Posted on August 26, 2009
That Senator Kennedy?s death was imminent could have been guessed from the statement issued earlier in the week that President Obama had no plans to visit him during his vacation on Martha?s Vineyard. Had the senator been in a condition to receive him, the president would almost certainly have gone to Hyannis, from personal affection, certainly, as well as from gratitude, but also in the knowledge (surely forgivable in a practicing politician) that a torch-passing ceremony would be useful just now in the struggle to get a health-care bill...

Holding All the Cards and Still Losing -- By: John J. Pitney Jr.

Posted on August 25, 2009
President Obama is plunging in the polls, and his health-care plans face an iffy future on Capitol Hill. His supporters blame right-wing muscle. ?I think it is very hard because [Democrats] don?t have the message machine the Republicans do,? says Democratic message guru George Lakoff...

Uncreative Destruction -- By: The Editors

Posted on August 25, 2009
When we talk about government policies destroying wealth, we usually mean taxes that shift money from efficient to inefficient uses. Rarely do we mean the deliberate destruction of valuable assets. Yet, thanks to the Cash for Clunkers program, which ground to a halt yesterday, we now have a visual aid to help with this abstract concept...

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